SystemVerilog is even cleaner. And those built-in simulation primitives....damn, I loved my SV classes.
Can you provide some reference link to systemVerilog?
http://standards.ieee.org/getieee/1800/download/1800-2012.pd...
There is an open source compiler which can compile the hardware description subset of system verilog to c++ called verilator:
http://www.veripool.org/wiki/verilator
It was originally developed to verify processor designs at DEC (Alpha etc.).
Unfortunately all the other features of system verilog are onl y implemented in commercial tools. I believe the Xilinx Vivado tools support most of it, the others are not really affordable if you are not at an academic institution (Modelsim/the Synopsis tools).
Thanks for the references though!